Language Log

This parrot is no more!

Fans of talking parrots will be saddened by the news that Alex, "a parrot who had a way with words", died last week. Alex was a parrot in Dr. Irene Pepperberg's lab (as noted in this very early post), and according to the obituary-like piece in the NYT, "Alex showed surprising facility. For example, when shown a blue paper triangle, he could tell an experimenter what color the paper was, what shape it was, and -- after touching it -- what it was made of." This sort of claim is balanced in the same NYT piece by the following:

Other scientists, while praising the research, cautioned against characterizing Alex's abilities as human. The parrot learned to communicate in basic expressions -- but it did not show the sort of logic and ability to generalize that children acquire at an early age, they said. "There's no evidence of recursive logic, and without that you can't work with digital numbers or more complex human grammar," said David Premack, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. (Link to Premack's homepage added.)

Of possible further interest to Language Log readers is the following error in the NYT piece, obviously introduced by an editor's word substitution:

[Alex] demonstrated off some of his skills on nature shows, including programs on the BBC and PBS.

That's obviously supposed to be showed off, and my guess is that the editor either thought it was too colloquial-sounding or perhaps didn't like the repetition with "nature shows" a few words later. But instead of replacing all of showed off with demonstrated, the off was left behind, resulting in the ungrammatical demonstrated off (at least it's ungrammatical to me; if it's not to you, I'd love to hear about it.)

The NYT piece ends with the following touching account of Dr. Pepperberg's final interaction with Alex.

Even up through last week, Alex was working with Dr. Pepperberg on compound words and hard-to-pronounce words. As she put him into his cage for the night last Thursday, Alex looked at her and said: "You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you."

He was found dead in his cage the next morning, and was determined to have died late Thursday night.

It's certainly not unimpressive that Alex had apparently learned to associate the quoted string of words above with being put back in his cage for the night. Call me callous, but I can't help but thinking that Alex's last words would have been very different if Dr. Pepperberg and her associates had taken to saying "see you later, bird-brain" to Alex every night.

[ The title of this post is brought to you by the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea. ]

[ Comments? ]

[Update -- a reader sent this note:

For your files on journalists and quotations. Did one of these papers confuse the person with the parrot?

" Death of gifted parrot stuns scientists", Boston Globe, 9/11/2007:

Pepperberg said she and Alex went through their good-night routine, in which she told him it was time to go in the cage and said: "You be good. I love you. I'll see you tomorrow." To which Alex said, "You'll be in tomorrow."

New York Times: (as quoted above):

Even up through last week, Alex was working with Dr. Pepperberg on compound words and hard-to-pronounce words. As she put him into his cage for the night last Thursday, Alex looked at her and said: "You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you."

It's the synoptic problem all over again... ]

[And the plot thickens, as the same reader points out. There is no correction in the NYT, but an editorial by Verlyn Klinkenborg (" Alex the Parrot" muses on the alleged fact that Alex's last words were "I love you".

For us, language is everything because we know ourselves in it. Alex's final words were: "I love you."

There is no doubt that Alex had a keen awareness of the situations in which that sentence is appropriate -- that is, at the end of a message at the end of the day. But to say whether Alex loved the human who taught him, we'd have to know if he had a separate conceptual grasp of what love is, which is different from understanding the context in which the word occurs. By any performative standard -- knowing how to use the word properly -- Alex loved Dr. Pepperberg.

The interesting thing about this is that it's much clearer that Alex loved Irene Pepperberg than it is what Alex's last words, if any, actually were.]

Posted by Eric Bakovic at September 10, 2007 05:33 PM